There is No Escape From Their Society

Jesse Caldwell

Interview by L. Valena

Can you describe what you responded to?

It was a sculpture of a cage, with a bunch of things written on it. Initially I couldn’t really tell what was inside of it. It was very poetic. I had a really hard time figuring out. I could imagine different ways to reinterpret it. But my brain just kept going back to building some sort of cage and putting it over my head, because I take a lot of self portraits. I was just going to put myself in a cage, because I do a lot of work with things over my face already. It felt like a cool way to use what I do. I think I also decided to use flowers at the very last minute, just because they’re also a very common theme in what I’ve been shooting forever. Rose stems!

I have a friend who lives a couple of blocks away, and his family owns a florist. I thought I would just go get their dead flowers and make a cage. That’s not what happened— the person working there that day looked at me like I was a crazy person. So I had to buy a bunch of roses, and miscalculated the amount that I needed to do what I wanted to do. I like what I did a lot, but I probably should have storyboarded it, drawn it, done the math a little better. It was all kind of on the fly. I really needed three dozen rose stems to make the thing that I wanted to.

It’s a tale as old as time.

I would think at this point I would have learned, when taking on a task like this, to just draw it out on a piece of paper beforehand, and not just have it all in my head. But I just don’t work that way. I’m someone who just grabs his camera and takes pictures with stuff that’s around. I don’t really build things generally. So this is probably the most conceptual, and I tried to combine a lot of my themes.

I don’t think of myself as a single person in a box. Since the last time we spoke, I’ve done a lot of personal growth, a lot of therapy. I’ve figured out my inner child. So I don’t really see myself as one thing ever. I have many different masks, or hats, or however I want to look at it. Creating one cage, and trying to take a bunch of pictures of the different kinds of things I allow the world to see of me, especially through my photography. It gave me a chance to use a couple of different techniques.

These are digital photographs that I printed on polaroids and then scanned. I made it unnecessarily fussy— I thought about the writing on the boxes. Man, if I had done that, I would have had one line, and it would have been the same line on each bar, because of the measurements. However they figured out how to space it... that would have driven me bonkers. So I wanted to add a fussiness to it based on that. Something that would not just be easy.

Scanning them was not as easy as I would have thought- I kind of left it imperfect, because after trying the first one a bunch I realized there was no way to make it perfect, and I needed to get it done.

I waited until the last minute to really have time. One day, I had the idea and I had the motivation. I think that’s been something that’s been weird for me the whole pandemic. My motivation comes and goes. One day I want to make and do stuff, and one small thing happens and I’m just robbed of drive. I haven’t beaten myself up about it. If it was pre-pandemic, I would have beaten myself up about that, but I’m glad I was able to just get it done. My scanner was just not behaving.

Wait, back up: these were digital photos that you scanned onto polaroid? Can you say more about this process?

I have this device that can turn any digital photo into a polaroid. I had bought it to make prints for a vacation I went on with someone. I had a bunch of film lying around for seven months, and it’s use it or lose it stuff. It’s a fun thing to play with. It’s unnecessary. I don’t want to necessarily recreate film, but usually I shoot things pretty soft and a little dreamy. I shot these all really sharp, so when I made the Polaroids, they would have more sharpness and not be super soft. So there was also an element of seeing if that would work.

The cage was a very interesting project to work around. I’ve lived a lot of the time in my own head. I’ve lived in a fantasy. I certainly could use the ideas of being trapped or imprisoned in many different ways. My creative process could probably be informed by that as well. I used to not take a picture if I felt that someone had already made that picture. And someone who wasn’t an artist told me that I had to throw that out. I had to make my own version of every photograph that had ever been taken. So that also allowed me to be very literal with this project.

I don’t like being too deep with naming the things that I make. “Caught/Trapped/No Way Out” are the first few words from a song. It’s a weird song from the band War Zone, a New York City hardcore band. They were around in the late 80’s until 1999 when the singer died. When I was a younger guy, it was definitely a band that inspired me and my friends. My very first band intentionally just sounded like a band that already existed. We wanted to be like War Zone.

The name of the song was “Escape from Your Society’’. It’s often mocked, because it’s “Caught, trapped, no way out/ Life’s so short I’m bugging out.” That’s the full first two lines of the song. It’s primitive, and lowbrow. But also when I first started thinking about the cage, it’s the first thing that comes to my mind. “Caught, trapped, no way out.” So I knew I was going to somehow put a little text in there. I initially thought about making a t-shirt or three separate tshirts with bleach. And then I decided to keep it simple and just add some text after scanning it.

Building a cage, making digital photos, transferring them to polaroids, and scanning them with rose petals behind them (which is a whole thing I’ll never repeat). Very messy, and actually put water on these beautiful polaroids I had just printed. I wasn’t sure how many photos I’d get- I wanted nine. And I wanted to use the three phrases ‘caught’ ‘trapped’ and ‘no way out’. I didn’t know if I would break it into three pieces and then combine it back into one. I didn’t know how it would look after scanning, and I really like this.

This process seems like it was a hell of a journey!

It was very indicative of the pandemic for me. Everything’s been last minute for me. That combination of motivation and inspiration. I’ve never really operated that way. I tend to be free-wheeling with my creativity, I don’t put too much pressure on myself. But I think having had a bunch of thoughts bouncing around in my head enabled me to do something that elaborate, in a really short amount of time.

When you look at the work now, what does it say to you?

It’s so uniquely me. It’s these self portraits that have this weird self confidence in some of them. There is this intentionally blurry one where I’m kind of hiding myself. There are some that are overly dramatic. It really was highlighting a bunch of different aspects of myself, which was not something I intentionally did at first.

I keep perpetuating the lie- people think they know me through my self portraits, maybe some of the stuff that I write, but in reality I’m not any one of those things. If you don’t see all of those things, you really don’t get what it’s like to be trapped in my head. To be all of these different things. And for a long time, I drank a lot. I think drinking helped me deal with figuring out who to be around what people. That probably wasn’t the best thing for my life. I think I used to be afraid of living authentically. Just being myself, means I get to show all portions of myself to everyone, all of the time. I don’t have to rub their faces in it, but I no longer have to pick and choose which bit of me comes out of that cage at any time.

I totally get that- it was the same for me. I’ve been sober for a few years, and it’s amazing how much more fully I can be myself now. I don’t have to worry about “which version of myself do you want me to be? How can I curate this situation so you’ll like me?” It’s so much better to not have to think about that.

So much of it is that box— when you don’t let yourself out, and allow yourself to be known, and you’re terrified. When all you want is people to know you, but you feel like they can’t accept you because of how screwed up you are, or how bad your trauma is. I keep going back to the lies, but it’s really just how we present ourselves. The ways we allow ourselves to be seen.

And so much of it is survival, right? I heard someone say that it’s like we were drowning, so we grabbed onto a life preserver. Then at some point we get onto land, but we’re still dragging these life preservers around with us.

One of the metaphors I used early on in therapy, was that I never felt like I was drowning. The way my depression manifested was that I was always just treading water. There were moments when I would get close to the shore, momentum would be behind me, and I would feel confident in ways that I never had before. Then I’d just get dragged back out with the tide.

I love water- I’m a water person. Water is very comfortable for me. And so when I looked at why I chose that particular metaphor, I realized that I was comfortable being depressed. I was comfortable just getting by. I was so used to living a life, knowing that I was going to get dragged back out. Now, I haven’t drank in 27 months. I’ve learned that the other shoe isn’t always waiting to drop, that the tide isn’t always going to drag me out.

I’ve loosely been pursuing photography as an art form for quite some time, and I don’t ever push myself or put myself out there. A lot of that is still things from my past preventing me from really believing that people will want what I do. Participating in something like this is really different for me. I’m an adult child of alcoholic dysfunction, and teamwork is not a good thing for me. If someone asked me to do something, I would say yes. But being like, “hey, can I do this thing?” is out of character for me. I really look for projects that don’t have a lot of pressure associated with them. I appreciate the space you give to artists, who are probably like me. It is a thing that makes me feel like I’m participating.

Call Number: Y46VA | Y48VA.caThe

Jesse Caldwell’s work often frames the fondness in filth and the provocation of perversion. His portraiture subjects behold the power of their own sexual prowess, a quality the artist holds in high regard. Nevertheless, he admits his main focus is never to offend nor shock, but rather to draw people together.